Confirming the industry's worst-kept secret, Valve CEO Gabe Newell has confirmed Valve is working on its 'Steam Box', a Steam-powered HTPC geared towards console-like gaming. It'll most likely run Linux. "Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment," he told Kotaku. "If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that's what some people are really gonna want for their living room." Steam has 50 million subscribers, so there's a market here. As a comparison: Xbox Live has 40 million subscribers.

Consoles are still pathetic when it comes to creating comprehensive user interfaces (unlike PCs which have keyboard and mouse at your disposal).

It's pathetic that you think "mouse & kb" is conductive to creating comprehensive UI ...all they do is promote one simplistic core mechanic of pointing at things, that's the only kind of gameplay they're good at. This killed few types of PC genres. At least (~arcade-ish, but still) flight sims live on on consoles; unfortunately Descent-like FPP games (which are fabulous on dual stick controller) didn't survive how "mouse & kb" dumbed FPP games down.

BTW, in Japan ~RTS and adventure games are still very popular ...just with different kind of UI, based around hierarchic menus, where joypads work fine.

Generally, it's also pathetic that you manage to overlook the great variety & innovation going on with console UI methods - did you really miss various types of controllers, custom input methods which happen on consoles? (or even no controller - like with Kinect)

More generally, people limiting themselves to only one kind of interaction, that would be possibly the biggest problem with pushing this kind of entertainment forward... (luckily, there are enough who enjoy gaming on both kinds of machines)